Repentance
by xheartmehorrid
Summary: [ somewhat Ryuhou x Kazuma ] Be the death of love the death of him.


**( repentance )**

Disclaim'd.

* * *

He prayed.

He succumbed.

Down on his shaking flesh-beaten knees, reddened and bruised and scraped with dirt and stung with rock so that the sore-skin protested fiercely. He'd stumbled too far, too quickly at a mad and reckless, clumsy dash and it showed on him with every splotch and scrape and crack in desperate countenance. Even with the pain, he kneels on the dusty and moth-strewn wooden floors, and wooden floorboards rotted out between the pews of ghosts and tongues so thick with Christ were swollen every gospel hymn, their souls in life devout and free will bled out forcibly for thorny crucifixion love. He kneels, he prays, succumbs, his hands are folded like knives, like steeple spires, and he is bashed. He is a creature beaten down.

His eyes are black and musty as the stone-embellished walls.

Inside they burn like fire, and itch to be gouged. The grief of loss is pounding coldly in his stomach, heart wrenching fire. Why was love ever so blind? Without it, was he ever alive? He didn't know, and so he prayed, and whispered brokenly, furious whispers; he'd been pressed twixt with two ashy thumbs before, knowing age and chastity and willful refrain, and even more than that wrinkled with faith and time; and christened with the oils at his birth, that washed the torrents away. Bowls of broken glass were his birth-bed, and death never knew his shame.

Burdened heart, was his heart, and his legs which went numb, lame, there laying on the wood-floor; the dust-floor, the oil-blood. The love and life in him was burning and it hurt like it would leap painfully out of him, expelled tearingly from his flesh. A fire and a needle pricked, and hapless, bitter thorn, and stomach all ablaze, and love a dark-watered mire.

His heart was beating slowly and purely, sin and desire absolved, here, but still coursing through blood veins; heroin lips hanging with poison ( _that he should kiss the salt and warm blood from those trembling breathless lips again _) and fists full of clenched dirt.

He whispers, _don't leave me here this way. So alone. _Alone in his body like a broken, bleeding limb. Bruises swell and spurt like black up thrusts of purple from his veins, lungs scraping with prayer, lungs failing in stifled, incense-heady air. His love is pain that swallows him whole, ugly sharp-toothed maw, and jaws of bitterest jealousy. That obsessive, violent hold on him is loosening, and now the stroke of grief alone is left entire, and savagely overcomes.

He says, _Death please, won't you come and take me? My wretched soul, it's yours for the taking. Have it I don't want it anymore I don't; it was never my own. _And hopes,_ If Death is merciless, then love, would you have mercy on me? _Echoes, _mercy, mercy, mercy._

He flings himself forward on all fours, and he screams, _I repent_, and he sobs, _I have sinned_. Holy Father, I ask less of you;  
Than I ever asked of him. . .

_Forgive me. _

_Forgive me_.

He'd feed the souls of the pristine dead with more of his blood, more of his own.

_Curse love that it would so quickly desert me. _It is a curse of bitter, spiteful tongueAnd still he falls down on broken, skinned knees and gasping weak bones and cries out that name - Kazuma, love! - Dearest love of mine, he says, only true love, only worthy love. I never wanted anyone more than I wanted you; believe me. Force-fed you lies with the shit and the piss and the disbelief, yours. So all the untruths, darling forgive me. I never deserved you I never deserved this._ Echoes, alone, alone, alone._

_I wouldn't wish the death of you on my worst enemy. _

And so he kneels, he prays;

Love slain, absolved, a'wash in fiery tears.

To the pain he succumbs slowly, breath start, stutter and stop. . .

What a trickle of blood does to one when it bleeds for so long with no aid, no covering to bandage:

Slowly bleeding wound,

That is love.

And so what of mercy? He lays himself down in the ashes, red eyes gleaming from his charcoal and tear smattered face, and whispers reaching out with shaking fingers,  
_Be the death of love the death of me._

And so his final will is carried out on the broke, moistened breath of unheard prayers, and frantic heartbeat lie still.

* * *


End file.
